Europe: Silly Americans, Cities Are For Pedestrians

Edward Niedermeyer
by Edward Niedermeyer

From its very first paragraph, a recent New York Times article trolls hard for defenders of America’s car-centric culture:

While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation.

Does that not have your red American blood boiling? Stand by for some technocratic condescension from a Euro-crat

“In the United States, there has been much more of a tendency to adapt cities to accommodate driving,” said Peder Jensen, head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European Environment Agency. “Here there has been more movement to make cities more livable for people, to get cities relatively free of cars.”

Though the piece continues generally in this vein, the NYT has blessedly decided that there is “Room For Debate” on this issue, and has posted a number of diverging perspectives on it. Urban planning is a notoriously heated topic, accentuating the urban-rural divide as well as the central-planning-versus-absolute-freedom ideological divide, both of which are more pronounced in the US than in Europe. With this in mind, let’s make sure we approach this topic in a respectful, constructive manner. It’s a topic that will inevitably come up again in the future, so let’s take this opportunity to practice discussing it without resorting to ideological name-calling. [HT: David Holzman]


Edward Niedermeyer
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  • Flomulgator Flomulgator on Jun 30, 2011

    I grew up in the suburbs in what, for a time, became the second most congested city in America. Like many cities, a hub-and-spoke model made traffic worst at the choke points near the outer ring of the "actual" city. I worked and commuted in it too, so I've suffered traffic as bad as anyone. Now I live in the city that everyone's trying so hard to get to. Shockingly, traffic is better in the city core itself. I'm as much if not more of a car nut than most people on this site, and I continue to own an enthusiast's car in the city center. Since I don't drive 45 mi. r/t to work @ $4/gal anymore, the garage fee is easy to swallow. Driving is more fun for me now than it ever was when commuting. But if I'm just getting around the city I use my feet or my bike (really I wish they'd get rid of one lane on every 3rd street for a better bike lane/sidewalk, but that would digress from my main point). Really what my point is is that your commute, is LITERALLY, killing you. Walking and biking are better for you physically, taking a bus/train/not leaving home are better for you mentally. All are better for you professionally. I'm sure most of the miles a person drives, and thus most of the gridlock, are wasted on commuting. And being such an insufferably BAD STYLE of driving, it drives (bad pun) people into something automatic and beige. Fortunately $4 gas will help kill the everyman commute, and new suburban work centers, urban housing renewal, and telecommuting will help on the incentive side. I am hopeful that these will help slide the trend of commuting medium to long distances from "every American must do it" to "some unfortunate Americans have to do it".

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    • Dynasty Dynasty on Jun 30, 2011

      @R H I used to commute by bus to work from an upper end neighborhood to city center and it was pleasant..... However, riding the bus from cracked out neighborhoods is a daunting experience. Although the time the man with the trench coat got on the bus and flashed everyone was pretty funny.

  • Obruni Obruni on Jun 30, 2011

    i was suprised to see how many undergound parking garages exist in Paris, and how inexpensive they were compared to other cities (120 euros a month in prime neighborhoods) Paris' major problem is the metro. Capacity has not changed much since the 1970s, and the system has reached its limit. On some lines such as the RER A, trains can pass by every two minutes, and they are completely packed like sardine tins. this isn't just a rush hour phenomenon either.

  • Japanese Buick Japanese Buick on Jun 30, 2011

    I certainly love my cars and driving, and I live on 20 acres in the sticks and spend about an hour a day in my car... almost none of it in heavy traffic. So I am no new urbanist. But when I visit cities that have good public transit, I enjoy it immensely. Maybe it's the tourist experience. But good public transit definitely provides a feeling of freedom that's different from driving a car, and neither is better than the other, so I reject the premise that car friendly or not is a question of freedom vs. control. In a pedestrian friendly city with good transit, there are other freedoms: To be able to hop a train or bus and be whisked where I want to go, and then when I get there hop off and walk to my ultimate destination without looking back to make sure the car is locked, parked properly, I'll remember where it is, etc. Not to mention that I didn't have to find a parking space, worry if the people parked next to me will ding my car, the transit stop is closer to where I'm going than any avaialble parking spaces and I don't have to drive around aimlessly looking for parking, etc etc. Both experiences rock, in different ways.

  • Redav Redav on Jun 30, 2011

    I don't think the issue is so much about density as it is about distance. Transportation is a non-value-adding activity. I live in the 'burbs, yet I drive very little because I don't have to go very far (~6 mi to work, and that's the farthest thing away). If the distribution of jobs & housing were aligned, you could dramatically reduce commutes, which eliminates most traffic. That then would mean less road capacity is required and less maintanence costs. It also means less costs (fuel, maintenance, replacement) for drivers, not to mention more free time and less stress. It also reduces pollution.

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    • Redav Redav on Jul 04, 2011

      @geozinger, What I mean is that moving (transporting) an item from one location to another does not change that item. It is still the same thing, but it's now there instead of here. Since it is the same item, transporting it has not improved it, in other words, has not increased its worth or value. Therefore, the activity of transportation is non-value adding. I do not mean to imply that a transportation system (such as roads & rail lines) are not valuable tools to the economy. Moving stuff is necessary, but the less you have to do, the better & cheaper it will be.

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